Above you see graph paper (I got mine from the Japanese site) that has the back of my sweater drawn on it. I plotted the entire back, stitch-by-stitch (using each square to represent one stitch).

Plotting your designs on graph paper before you even put needle-to-yarn allows you to see the relationship between different parts of your design and make any corrections. Believe me, erasing a mistake in a design is much better than having to frog a mistake. And as Deborah Newton says in her book, "Designing Knitwear", it allows you to "knit" the piece before you actually sit down to knit the piece. I don't know what I would have done without it. It is especially useful if you're writing a pattern for multiple sizes because, once you have plotted your first size, you can use different colored pencils to plot the design for different sizes.

And here are the books I have in my library that I constantly referred to:

They can all be found at amazon.com. Many of you probably already have them.